Tennis: As the Big Four are set to reunite, what chance everyone else?

Location: Acapulco, Mexico

After more than 7 months out of action with tendinitis in his knee, Rafael Nadal has taken just 30 days to re-affirm not just his position with-in the big four but his status as favourite for the French Open. His 6-0 6-2 demolition of current world no.4 David Ferrer at the Mexican Open in Acapulco has drawn attention once more to the enormous gulf between the elite and the very very good.

Now while the road ahead for Nadal will only get tougher, particularly on his knees, given the upcoming hard court stops at Indian Wells and Miami, his clay court prowess and incredible matchplay ethic will quickly return him to his place among a big four like no other in tennis history. And so what of that next level, the players just below that top 4, Ferrer, Del Potro, Tsonga and Berdych etc. who seem all to often to be competing in a separate tournament where success is a quarter final spot and consolidation of your ranking. Looking at Grand Slam record books, it would seem that for these fantastically talented sportsmen, theirs is simply a story of bad timing.

Lukas Rusol showed in defeating Nadal at Wimbledon last year that the best players in the world don’t necessarily have free passes to the quarter finals of the most important events in men’s professional tennis. This has been easily forgotten given the incredible run of the top players in the game at the highest level they compete. Over the last 7 years, Nadal has failed to make it to the last eight of a Grand Slam tournament he entered on just 3 occasions. Novak Djokovic holds the same record of 25 quarter final appearances from his last 28 major tournaments. If Roger Federer fails to advance to the quarters of one this year’s slams it will be the first time in 9 years that has happened. Andy Murray is also putting together an impressive streak of being around at the business end of slams that looks set to continue a while longer.

But what’s new I’m sure you ask, the best players get to the final stages and win the big tournaments, duh!

That is certainly true when we look at grand slam winners in past decades. 

In the 1980's 24 of the 40 Grand Slam events were won by 4 players (Lendl, Wilander, McEnroe, Becker), in the 1990's incredibly, the same number, 24 Grand Slams won by either Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier or Stefan Edberg. In the 2000's it took just 3 players (Federer, Nadal, Agassi) to capture that magical number of 24 Grand Slams in that 10 year period. But even with this level of dominance by a select few, that still leaves 16 grand slams over a ten year period for the best of the rest.

But what is different about this era from those before is a lack of sporadic success from those players that make up the rest of the top 20 or 30 players in the world. Noticeably absent from the past decade is the player who while not a consistent threat to the upper echelons of the game, put it all together for 2 weeks of his career to achieve something spectacular. In the future we may see Juan Martin Del Porto in this category though he still remains likely to win further.

So far in the 2010's, with 13 Grand Slam tournaments in the books, we have 4 different champions, now obviously 33% of this decades Grand Slams represents a small sample size I agree. However when you assess that 30 of the last 32 Majors were won by just 3 men the picture is clearer. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have exerted a dominance never seen before, and while Federer is still in the mix up in the near future, his replacement, on a list of the 3 players most likely to win the majority of the next 32 majors is set in stone. Having waited a considerable amount of time for Andy Murray to step up from perennial semi-finalist to continuous championship contender, he is there now.

So are David Ferrer, Jo Wilfred Tsonga and Thomas Berdych ever likely to follow in the footsteps of Richard Krajicek, Thomas Johansson or Gaston Gaudio and burst through the heavily guarded gates of the grand slam champion’s pavilion for one burst of unforgettable success? This blog doubts it, Federer’s slow decline and Nadals' ailing body may open those gates slightly, but Djokovic, Murray and a fast developing crop of youngsters are ready to slam them shut again.